Wynne Godley

Wynne Godley, who died in 2010, worked at the Treasury between 1956 and 1970 before becoming a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and director of the university’s Department of Applied Economics. He was the author, with Marc Lavoie, of Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth. He is often credited with anticipating the mass employment of the early 1980s, the problems with monetary union in Europe (in ‘Maastricht and All That’, published in the LRB in 1992) and the 2008 financial crash. Briefly a professional oboist in his youth, he was later a director of the Royal Opera House. He described his ‘disastrous encounter with psychoanalysis’ in a much praised piece in the LRB.

Letter
Terry O’Shaughnessy rightly takes me to task concerning Keynes and the ‘inflation tax’ (Letters, 22 October). I transposed a course of action which Keynes discussed into one which (I for a moment wrongly imagined) he had advocated. But my mistake has no bearing on the substantial points argued in my article and O’Shaughnessy is therefore wrong to say that it weakened my case. He goes on to...
Letter
SIR: The answer to Mr Hardie (Letters, 6 December) is that for any given level of our own farmers’ real income the taxpayer would obtain a large direct benefit if Britain were not a member of the EEC. The point in the article to which Mr Hardie refers was that if sterling were to become very strong our own agriculture could, under EEC rules, be ruined, and we would have no power to prevent this,...

For thirty years after the war Britain had full employment, stable (if slow) growth, low inflation, and a welfare state that was widely admired. And it was common ground that governments could...

Read more reviews

Keynesianism in One Country

Lester Thurow, 1 September 1983

Godley and Cripps devote their first seven seven pages to acknowledging the storms that are raging around the subject of macroeconomics. Deteriorating economic performances, and monetarists,...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences